P.R.B.
By Paul O’Keeffe
There are 12 at table, one short of a Last Supper. Twelve, unless the lank-haired servant standing on the right is counted. He would make it 13. The image is by Millais, from Keats, out of Boccaccio; from Isabella; or The Pot of Basil, out of the fifth tale, Day Four of the Decameron. John Keats’s words accompanied its first exhibition by way of explanation: Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel! Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye! They could not in the self-same mansion dwell Without some stir of heart, some malady; They could not sit at meals but feel how well It soothed each to be the other by They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep But to each other dream, and nightly weep. And no one could help noticing that the young steward – his very apparel flushed pink – was attracted to the daughter of the house and that she was attracted to him. Lorenzo has a white rose growing out the top of his head, Isabella a passion flower growing out of hers. Even more of a giveaway, the two plants twine blatantly together, in the window arch above, which itself links the lovers for all to see. He does not need to offer her half his orange, like a shy schoolboy at break time, to make the situation any plainer. They are, in modern parlance, an item. And the way he looks at her: all eyes, dripping adoration. He is the only one who can look at her like that, the only one able to stare, face on. Everyone else is in profile. No one on that overcrowded side of the table appears to notice, or they pretend not to. The one at the far end draining his glass, the chubby, busty one next, the one paring fruit, the one popping a grape, the one wiping his mouth with a napkin or stifling a belch, all mind their own business. Even the servant looks the other way. Isabella avoids eye-contact as she accepts the orange, but she pats the dog’s head lying in her lap, a gesture of affection and acknowledgement, at one remove, of the doggily devoted Lorenzo‘s gesture. Only the old nurse might be casting a worried look – unavoidably sidelong – at the devoted family steward perilously close to carrying devotion a shade too far. She knows the danger. She knows her young mistress’s brothers, has probably known them since they were vicious, fly-torturing little boys:
These brethren having found by many signs What love Lorenzo for their sister had, And how she lov’d him too, each unconfines His bitter thoughts to other, well nigh mad That he, the servant of their trade designs Should in their sister’s love be blithe and glad When t’was their plan to coax her by degrees To some high noble and his olive trees.
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Keats tells of two murderous brothers. Boccaccio tells of three. Millais offers two, together with a possible third, even a fourth suspect, ranged along the left side of the table. The hot-headed one in the foreground, grinding his teeth and kicking the whippet, will doubtless twist the first blade. Next to him, the intelligence behind the crime, coolly works up his blood-lust, viewing their victim and his presumption through the crimson filter of his wine. The grinning, wholesomelooking youth beyond might be another brother. He might be drawn into the killing, though not as a prime mover. The jury remains out in the case against the fourth man. Face concealed, headgear covering all but the hair at the nape of his neck, the only feature that could pick him out of an identity parade is a prominent wart at the angle of the jaw. The foreground psychopath cracks a nut and kicks the dog, cracking and kicking, by proxy, the lovelorn Lorenzo. Propelled forward by the kick onto the two front legs of his chair, a moment later, force of action spent, he will rock back. Another dog lies sleeping under the chair – a trusting, vulnerable tangle of slender limbs – oblivious of the ball and claw feet poised carelessly above to crush and maim. Their plot laid, the brothers will lure the steward away for a day’s ride, ‘three leagues towards the Apennine’, and he – trusting and oblivious – will go with them. Then, in a forest ‘quiet for the slaughter’, they will kill Lorenzo and bury him. To cut a long, 63-stanza, story short, the murdered Lorenzo will appear to Isabella in a dream and show her his grave. Accompanied by her old nurse – who might have known and seen it all coming – she will visit the forest, find the grave and retrieve her lover’s head. She will comb its matted hair. She will wash the soil from its sunken eyes with her tears. She will wrap it in perfumed silk. Finally, she will secrete it in the very pot of basil that rested on the window ledge, destiny unsuspected, in the background of that last tense supper. * John Everett Millais was still only 19 in November 1848 when he stood in front of his pristine, gleaming, whiteprimed canvas. His friends, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, were concerned that he was cutting it somewhat fine if he was to have the picture finished by the following May in time for that year’s Royal Academy Exhibition. The three young men – Hunt was 20, Rossetti 21 – had but recently agreed to call themselves ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’. The aim of their group was to emulate the palette, style and sincerity of those obscure 14th and 15th Century ‘Italian Primitives’ whose names were to be found only in the very earliest pages of Vasari’s Lives of the Painters: Giotto, Gozzoli, Fra Angelico, Massaccio, Orcagna. The innocent spirit which had directed the invention of [these painters] was traced point by point, recalled Hunt, with the determination that a kindred simplicity should regulate our own ambition, and we insisted that the naïve traits of frank expression and unaffected grace were what had made Italian art so essentially vigorous and progressive John Ruskin would summarise, five years later, what this small number of very young men with their unfortunate and somewhat ludicrous name , came together to assert that the principles on which art has been taught for 300 years are essentially wrong, and that the principles which ought to guide us are those which prevailed before the time of Raphael.
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Isabella was to be Millais’s first essay in the new manner aspiring to revive the austerity, formalism and accurate draughtsmanship of the early Renaissance. Rienzi vowing to obtain justice for the death of his young brother, slain in a skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini factions was to be Hunt’s, and The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, Rossetti’s. All three painted on a dazzling white ground intended to make their colours shine as though backlit. All three resolved to follow Ruskin’s dictum: ‘… to go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.’ All three appended the initials P.R.B to their signatures. Millais wrote them as a monogram of overlapping letters. He repeated the designation, incorporating the P, R and B into the picture itself, in the form of a carved inscription at the base of Isabella’s stool. The Brethren solemnly swore not to divulge what the letters stood for. They were young men and relished the drama and mystery of a secret society. And like young men they joked as to what else the letters might be understood to signify. There was talk of sharing a studio and having PRB engraved in brass on the door: Please Ring Bell. Someone, mysteriously, even suggested it might stand for Penis Rather Better. They were, as Ruskin said, very young men. Even before the precise meaning of the three letters became common knowledge a year later, the critics had readily cottoned on to the general lines of what the young men were about. The Athenaeum correspondent pointed out that Millais’s picture (and, for that matter, Hunt’s and Rossetti’s) was ‘a recurrence to the expression of a time when art was in a state of transition or progression rather than accomplishment.’ And he offered the gently stated opinion that ‘if the artist must have some particular model for his practice, the perfect rather than the imperfect would surely be a wiser adoption.’ In particular, he criticised Isabella for ‘that inlaid look, that hard monotony of contour and absence of shadow which are due to the practice of a time when knowledge of light and shade and of the means of imparting due relief by the systematic conduct of aerial perspective had not been obtained.’ He had a point. One of the disconcerting features of Millais’s first Pre-Raphaelite picture is that it offers no illusion of depth or recession. The same clarity of focus is given to background as to foreground – to the man ‘farthest away’ draining his glass, as to the ‘nearer’ Isabella patting her dog. In photographic terms it would be called a ‘large depth of field’, the disorientating effect achieved by opening the camera aperture to its fullest extent, exposing everything equally and starkly but telescoping space to flatness. The eye tries in vain to reconcile the length of table necessary to accommodate eight place settings along one side, with the length that the table actually appears to be. The shallowness of the fictive picture space is accentuated by the protagonists, with one exception, appearing in profile like overlapping paper cutouts. It is as if only thus can so short a table seat so many people. Then there is something ambiguous in the shape of the chamber. The vertical edge of that slanting patch of shadow to the left of the window ought to mark the corner of the room, with the window wall imagined as running at 90 or so
degrees to the back wall. That was certainly the impression given in a preparatory sketch for the picture, where the window arch was narrowed, as if viewed at an oblique angle. But in the finished painting it is as if the windowed section of wall, like a hinged theatrical bookflat, has been pushed back – flattened with the perspective – into the same plane as the patterned wall. It is, of course, necessary that the window arch appear head on. It is a load-bearing arch supporting the entire weight of symbolism connecting Lorenzo to Isabella. ‘Pre-Raphaelitism has but one principle,’ declared Ruskin, ‘that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature and from nature only.’ Yet therein lies a paradox. It is this minutely detailed depiction of nature that makes the picture unnatural. This is not the way we look at the world. We bring into sharp focus only that on which we concentrate our full attention, that which is of most interest or of primary importance. The effect of looking at a picture such as this, in which every inch of the composition is delineated with equal microscopic clarity, is to have everything stressed as being of equal importance. It is the optical equivalent of reading a text in which EVERY.SINGLE.WORD.IS.EMPHASISED.AND. GIVEN.THE.SAME.WEIGHT.OF.EXPRESSION. Such exclamatory prose can finally render itself meaningless. But there is a benefit. Presented as we are with this wealth of detail calling for our attention, the experience of viewing the picture becomes an exploration; a search for clues, a forensic investigation as of a crime scene. Or, more properly in this case, the scene of a crime-to-be. Details prefigure the dark deed in the forest: a hawk pecking at a white feather, a split blood orange, blood-red wine, spilt salt, broken nutshells. Even the crockery might give warning to the hapless Lorenzo if he could only tear his eyes away from his beloved and look down at it: the design of the nearest majolica plate appears to show a man battering out another’s brains with a rock. But as the eye meanders from detail to detail, symbol to symbol, across the picture surface, it is arrested by a curious shadow on the tablecloth. It has been interpreted as the ‘shadow of the arm of the foremost brother … cast across [the] salt, thus linking him directly with the future bloodshed.’ But its shape and position invites another explanation. Jutting out from the precise junction of the brother’s white hosed thighs, it is as conspicuous an erection as any late night embellishment of a bus shelter advertising poster, or toilet wall graffito. The scurrilous detail – indiscernible until pointed out and then an irresistible focus of attention – is not related to any aspect of the pictorial narrative. It is unrelated to anything in Keats’s poem, or to anything in Boccaccio’s original story. It is, however, entirely explicable as the private, visual joke of a precocious youth, not yet out of his teens.
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